Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Working the Tarot can bring us in contact with past masters of this system. On a fall evening, I had been discussing Tarot and did a personal reading in which the last two cards were the Hanged Man and the High Priestess. When I lay down, preparing for sleep, I had a strong sense of contact with a female personality. I had no doubt she was a priestess. I associated her with a woman who had led a great esoteric order in Britain, and used the Qabalistic Tarot (as they called it) in her teachings and rituals.[1] This woman died six months before I was born, but I had often dreamed of her and her circle.

The priestess invited me to go on an astral journey, and instructed me to put on special vestments, black, white and silver. She led me to an inner temple and showed me the gateway to the path of the High Priestess on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. This is the longest and most challenging of the journeys known as Tarot pathworkings, requiring the traveler to cross the Abyss. I was told that I must on no account veer, or even look, to right or left, where there were all manner of threats, temptations and distractions. I embarked on the journey. At the place where the road crossed the path of Strength, I learned something new about the Lion. I was required, at this point, to leave my second body – my astral body – behind, as I had left my physical body behind in the bed. This was the condition for crossing the Abyss and “shooting for Kether”, the Crown. I survived the whirling swords of attackers who may have been very fierce Gatekeepers. I came at last to a chamber with curving walls. Where the priestess reappeared, indicating that I had earned the right to knowledge of secret and essential things. She described the chamber as a “premonistory”, a word unknown to me. Through an observation window, I looked out into an ocean in which people swam about in strange diving suits that looked like the skins of giant fish. Or perhaps they were fish-people. Some of the males were whiskered like catfish. It came to me that these might be the true people of Atlantis. The priestess explained:We came from the sea. The Source of Light determined to experiment with several species. Since most of the planet is covered with water, it was possible that the most propitious environment was the dominant one.The early Masters came from the waters, in the literal as well as the cosmic sense. This is remembered in the Chaldean stories of Ea, known to the Greeks as Oannes, and in the myths of the Dogon and other African peoples. Our form was human only by adaptation: the equivalent, on the physical plane, of the contact pictures projected by archangels and ascended Masters to greet and educate humans who are journeying into the astral on the paths of initiation. Hence the significance of the Hanged Man, in its reference to the element of Water, and of Nun and Tzaddi, associated with Death and the Star, in the Qabalistic Tarot.[2]We remember the founding priesthood as Atlantean, in the exact sense of Plato’s myth. It is recollected in a differing version in the Irish legends of Fomorians and invaders. To this day, the sea is the guardian and repository of the deepest mysteries. It has absorbed and transformed the effluvium of human waste and veil; this is remembered in the story of the ten thousand sealed vessels Solomon had cast beneath the waves. Great entities live far between its depths, at levels no human has plumbed – or will ever plumb – in the corporeal body. It is of the most urgent consequence that the sea should be appeased, its rulers propitiated. Never forget that the Moon is ruler of the sea and its tides. The seas have been ravaged by mankind. The fish are dying. It is time for humans to give back, through sacrifice.

Note: After recording the passage above ("We came from the sea") I picked up Dion Fortune's magical novel The Sea Priestess, and soon found myself reading, for the first time, the chapter in which the narrator picks two cards from a gypsy's Tarot deck: the High Priestess and the Hanged Man. I recorded this beyond-astral journey in my journal on November 17, 1994. The last words of the priestess seem urgently relevant in the wake of the Gulf oil disaster.[1] The magicians of the Golden Dawn and its offshoots practiced "Qabala", as distinct from the Jewish Kabbalah. The attributions of the Tarot trumps and the Hebrew letters to the paths between the sephiroth on the Tree of Life are explained by Robert Wang in Qabalistic Tarot.[2] Nun, in the Hebrew alphabet, means "fish" and in Qabalistic Tarot it is identified with trump XIII, Death. Tzaddi means "fish hook" and is associated with trump XVII, The Star. The letter Mem, meaning "water", is identified with trump XII, the Hanged Man, which was chosen by the Golden Dawn as the symbol of the Order.

Monday, March 30, 2015

We are time travelers in our dreams and one thing that goes on,
probably every night, is that the dream self travels into the possible future,
scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Depending on whether
we remember such dream scouts, and can read the information correctly, and can
then decide on appropriate action, we can move away from undesirable future
events and towards ones that are more attractive.

My recent
experience in which clock time - unusually - corresponded to a dream
has me thinking about a great pioneer researcher in this field. He was in every
way a product of Britain in the Edwardian era. I can think of few less likely
candidates for Psychic Friends Network – as either client or reader – than
J.W.Dunne (1875-1949).

A gentleman soldier and aviator, he came out of the
Anglo-Irish military caste. He designed and built the first British military
aircraft, and his prototype was soon adopted and manufactured in the
United States. He was devoted to fly fishing. In all things, he was a
determined scientist and rationalist who looked for the logic in
life’s anomalies. Like the best Britons, he was also marvelously pragmatic: if
the data presented to

him did not fit existing theories of how things worked,
then to hell with the theories.

The data that shook Dunne’s conception of
reality – first when he was a sub-lieutenant of the Imperial Yeomanry, fighting
the Boers, then when he was convalescing in Italy, and many times later – were
dreams in which he saw, with remarkable accuracy, events that lay in the
future. Sometimes his dreams anticipated news of world events that he
had not yet received. His dreams gave him “news flashes” of an earthquake in
Madagascar and of troop movements in Sudan long before the newspapers arrived
with printed reports of those events.

Dunne started keeping a detailed journal of his dreams,
and found that he dreamed of the future – on average – as often as the past.
This led him to realize that in dreams, time works differently than in our usual
experience of waking life. He drew friends and family members into an ongoing
“Experiment with Time” and collected a great deal of data on “time
displacement” as observed in dreams.

He extended his experiments into waking precognition –
for example, by trying to guess what he would find in a book he would later
pick up at random in his club. He quickly concluded that precognition can be
achieved in waking states as well as in dreams, but requires “a steadying of
attention” and practice in controlling the imagination that are not easily
attained.

He published his findings in 1927 in a book
titled An Experiment with Time that had wide influence in the
interval between the two world wars; it was read and eagerly discussed by many
leading scientists, writers and politicians.

Dunne evolved a complex mathematical model he called
Serialism in his effort to account for the fact that time does not move in a
linear fashion in dreams – and perhaps in the larger universe. In his last
book, Intrusions?, published posthumously, he makes the bold
statement that his precognitive dreams were "caused by something
which I was going to experience in waking life later on”.

This is a most interesting theory: that future events not
only cast a shadow before them, but cause us to dream of them – and
perhaps, in dreaming, to help bring a certain event track into our physical
experience, out of an immense range of alternative possible futures.

In Intrusions?, he provided further details of the
precognitive dreams recounted in An Experiment with Time that he
suppressed in the earlier book, apparently for fear of not sounding scientific
and respectable. The strongest dream "intrusions" containing
glimpses of the future were often accompanied by inner voices, sometimes a
tremendous chorus of voices crying "Look, look, look!" He describes
this phenomenon as the "rousing of attention".

Dunne moved towards the understanding that our experience
of linear time is an illusion of the limited ordinary mind. Viewed
from the fourth dimension, past, present and future are in fact
simultaneous and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception
of them. In the dream state the mind was not shackled in this way and was able
to perceive events in the past and future with equal facility.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

I look at my watch. It is nearly 4:20. I must get on with my
lecture. I close my eyes.
I am standing before to a group of
forty or fifty people seated in chairs arranged in a relaxed horseshoe pattern.
It is rather irritating that behind the audience is a café area where people
are talking quite loudly. At one point, I have to call to the café crowd to
keep it down, and they do.
My subject is time, and the dreamer’s
relationship with time. I talk briskly and smoothly about how, especially in
dreams, consciousness is forever traveling ahead of the body, returning with
reports about conditions on the roads ahead. We can use these travelogues from the
future to make better choices at the crossroads that lie before us.
I next talk about how we also travel
into the past. We visit scenes from our earlier lives. We visit other eras
across history, sometimes as observers, sometimes entering fully into the mind
and experience of other personalities. I talk about how we need to discern
carefully whether we are dealing with ancestors, spiritual kin, reincarnational
dramas – or counterpart personalities living in other times and other
realities.
To get a handle on all of this, I
suggest, we need to rise to the perspective of a self on a higher level, a hub
personality or oversoul. From this perspective, we may be able to recognize
that a number of personalities – including our present selves – are joined to a
central personality, a slightly higher self, as spokes join the hub of a wheel.
Looking from this position, from above and beyond linear time, we can see that
the dramas of many personalities are playing in the same spacious Now, and turn
with each other.
This is all being received well, but
I keep looking at my wristwatch because I am determined to finish in precisely
forty minutes, on the hour. I succeed.
I open my eyes and look at the
wristwatch I left on my bedside table. It is precisely 5:00 in the morning. The
time I spent giving my lecture, in my dream, exactly coincided with the time
that I lay in bed. Contrary to what people may say, dreamers can get things done on time.

AfternoteSports psychologists report that athletes get the same benefits from practice or workout in dream/visualization as in physical reality, but that full value depends on doing the exercises over the same time period. I was intrigued by my experience of conducting a dream activity (in this case, giving a lecture) in exactly the same period of linear time that would be required in ordinary reality. However, the great thing in general about dream time is that it is
almost infinitely elastic, so we can have experiences that would take days or
longer in a few minutes, when that pleases us and our dream helpers.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

When I arrived in Tallinn, Estonia last month to lead a dream workshop, I found the hotel lobby filled with marvelous paintings of luminous winged beings. I was thrilled to learn that the artist, Reet Kalamees, was coming to my workshop and that her theme was "Flying in Dreams and Awake". Our meeting received a little nod from the universe. Her exhibition at the Euroopa Hotel had been scheduled to end a week before my event, but had been unexpectedly extended. At our first meeting, Reet told me how she felt that one of her pictures was for me. She showed me a striking canvas with a blue figure whose huge wings are crackling with sparks of light. She explained that the image had come to her in a powerful vision, in which she felt the presence of a great bird, six months before we met. With great generosity, as described in my last post, Reet insisted on gifting me with the painting - "He Sees" - and it is now at home in my home. Over lunch that weekend, Reet described how her paintings are often inspired by dreams and visions. I asked her to write an account of her work, and to let us know the birthing process for some of her individual paintings. Reet has now generously contributed the following inspiring account, with the stories of several of her pictures:

PAINTING WITH ANGELS

by Reet Kalamees

For years now I've felt a strong urge to
paint. And not just paint, but to paint angels, beings of light and the
beautiful spiritual world. For me angels represent the connecting link between
heaven and earth, between humans and the Creator. Cooperation with them has
been truly inspiring. Visions of my new paintings are often given to
me through dreams and meditation. I've had over twenty exhibitions and my
paintings have found homes all over the world.

Mostly I paint in two ways:

According to the vision I get from
my dream or meditation or a vision related to a person I’m painting for.

Without a vision- I just open my
heart and I accept what the universe wants to express through me.

I would like to thank the Universe and the Creator for the inspiration and
support.Who am I? Angel artist? Spiritual artist? Visionary artist? All of my paintings have a very special purpose - to
help people - whether you are in need of spiritual guidance, positive energy,
support at a difficult time, to strengthen your relationship with someone
etc.

I have loved to draw and paint since childhood. As
grown-ups, we often forget the child in us and tend to take life too seriously.
But then some life event(s) will remind us who we really are. Already as a
child, I had a strong feeling that besides our ordinary everyday world, there
is something way greater-the invisible, eternal and infinite Universe. In my
childhood, during the gloomy Soviet time, dreams were a great way to escape and
I have always been a great dreamer.

A few decades ago I
was brought back to painting, because all of a sudden through my paintings beings
of light, angels, spiritual guides, teachers and counselors showed up. For
years now I have been painting the world that remains invisible to many, with
all its power, energy and the characters from its light vibration. And this
journey has been so incredibly fascinating, enriching and full of blessings and
miracles. Often when I start painting I do not have a clear idea what I will paint, I
simply open my heart to allow the Universe to express through me what it
wishes. For me it is important, that through
my paintings I can bring people more light, higher vibration and that, without
exception, we are all divine beings. With my creation, I
would like to thank all those extraordinary people who have played an important
role in my spiritual journey. I would like to thank the Universe
and the Creator for all the inspiration and support. May these paintings touch all the people who
have an open heart and are willing to take on more magic and miracles into
their life.

The story behind some of my paintings:

JOIN
MEStay in the wind of my wings.
Keep close to my heart.
To take flight, all we need is to believe.

This is one of my
first oil paintings from 2007 and it is very special for me. The vision for
this painting was given to me in a fraction of a second. I saw two different
sides of a whole, which formed a divine union in higher consciousness. Everything
and everyone is connected in total synchrony and harmony. When I look at this
picture, I still to this day feel a great longing. A lot a people have given me
feedback on this picture and said they feel a sense of recognition when looking at this painting as if they are
reminded of something they have turned
away from.

Many pictures are
coming directly from my dreams:

Heavenly Horse or
Creature of hay

HEAVENLY
HORSESHeavenly horses in their heavenly stable.
Talking to the stars.
Say a word on behalf of the humans.

Heavenly horse is a dreamlike
mystical being resembling a horse and vibrating in a very high frequency. In my dream
the horse was made of hay and was not in any way an ordinary creature All
over its body were doors and gates, which served as hideouts during danger. Like
a heavenly Trojan horse. In that particular dream I was with my mother and we
went to hide in the horse and came out after the danger passed.

Somehow I knew that heavenly horses protect our dreams as
well. Consequently, I have drawn a lot of heavenly horses
for children to bring them warm, safe and supportive dreams.

At the Source of Life

Standing midst flowing light.
Letting go of all that has been.
The presence is all that remains.

Two transparent
creatures standing midst running spring water. The water is not the water we
are used to, but a liquid flowing light. In the dream the beings of light
consume that light, they drink that light and pour it all over themselves until
one moment they will become that light
and diffuse into eternity.

TWIN
SOULS

Reflection
within a reflection
Light within a light
To be where you belong and present.

In my life I have met a
lot of souls, whom I remember and know from previous lives. Some of them have been my twin souls. Meeting
those souls creates synchronicity and the feeling of being present. Even if those
encounters are meant to be brief, they create a new impulse, help me better
perceive my journey and make it more meaningful.

All art (c) Reet Kalamees. Please visit her website, where you will find both prints and original artworks available. You can find some of her art with English commentary on this American site.

Friday, March 27, 2015

There are artists who help us remember that the soul has wings. Estonian artist Reet Kalamees is one of them. Look at one of her pictures of light beings in flight and you will feel your soul beginning to shake out its wings. I met Reet last month in Tallinn where she explained to me how her wonderful pictures are often inspired by dreams and visions of flight. Now she has gifted me with an extraordinary painting. She sent me this letter explaining the origin of her painting "He Sees" and why she has given it to me:"I painted this picture six months before you came to Tallinn. While I was painting, I felt the presence of a large bird, like a hawk or eagle. As the painting, emerged, I felt that the picture is connected to the powerful and wise soul of a man. . "This being of light has enormous wings. They are somehow illuminated. In my vision as this bird-man flies, hundreds of sparks of light fall to the earth from his winds. The sparks explode, creating marvelous waves of light. This is a way he brings gifts to earth.. "Robert, when I first saw you in Tallinn, I realized in an instant, that the soul that is connected to this picture, is you. I want you to have this picture, because I know it is for you and my guidance is that it will bring you a message beyond my words. "I named this painting 'He Sees'."I wrote this little text about it, as I do with all my paintings:HE SEESHe seesHe touches soulsEven ifyou don't realize"Art: "He Sees" by Reet Kalamees.

I am in a magical library of the kind Jung would have loved, full of rare volumes of alchemy, mythology, ancient philosophy. I am in modern clothes, but I act like a Renaissance magus who actually knows what he is doing. I am engaged in the Great Work of creating a kind of Cosmic Man. He comes to life as a tall, well-built Caucasian man with fine red-gold hair and trimmed beard. His body is draped with planetary, elemental and zodiacal symbols, clustered especially over the upper torso and lower body. Over his shoulder he wears a loose-flapping banner with the inscription, "Fortunate is he who is able to know the causes of things."I woke happy and excited. I recognized
the words on the banner. They are borrowed from Virgil'sGeorgics,Book 2, line 490. The original Latin isFelix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,literally
"fortunate was he who was able to know the causes of things." I shall have to do some reentry work to recover all
the symbols. The 19th century image (above) from Jaipur of Vishnu as Cosmic Man
has a similar placement of symbols, though as human types the figures are very
different.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

We
do not know where death awaits us, so let us wait for it everywhere. To
practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has
unlearned how to be a slave.

This wisdom comes from the great French essayist, Montaigne, and I
count it as one of the essential rules for living.

To live today to the
fullest, we want to be ready to die. When we approach life in the knowledge
that Death is at our left shoulder, we find courage and clarity that may
otherwise fail us.

. I have known this since
I was a child, when I died and came back, as the Melbourne doctors put it, not
yet possessing the term “near-death experience”. In my books and workshops, I
encourage people to make Death their ally rather than their dread, and to be
ready to meet him on any day, on any corner.

What does it mean, to
“practice death”?

An art of dying
adequate to our needs and yearnings today must address at least these five key
areas:

1.Practice in dream travel and journeying beyond the body. By practicing
the projection of consciousness beyond the physical plane, we settle any
personal doubts about the soul’s survival of physical death. This is not really
an exotic or esoteric assignment. Every night, in your dreams, you travel
beyond the body quite naturally and spontaneously; it’s a matter of waking up
to what is going on and learning to use your natural gifts as a dreamer,

2.Developing a personal geography of the afterlife. Through
conscious dream journeys, we can visit the deceased — and their teachers — in
their own environments. We can explore a variety of transit areas and reception
centers, adapted to the expectations and comfort levels of different types of
people, where the recently departed are helped to adapt to their new
circumstances. We can tour the “collective belief territories,” some
established centuries or millennia ago, where ex-physicals participate ins
hared activities and religious practices. We can examine processes of life review,
reeducation, and judgment and follow the transition of spirits between
different after-death states. We can also study the different fates of
different vehicles of consciousness after physical death.

3.Helping the dying. We can use dreamwork and the techniques of
Active Dreaming – including vision transfer, which means growing a dream or a
journey map for someone who needs one – to help the dying through what some
hospice nurses describe as the “nearing death experience.”In many of our
hospitals (where most Westerners die) death is treated as a failure, or merely
the loss of vital signs, followed by a pulled-out plug, a disconnected
respirator, and the disposal of the remains. As we recover the art of dying,
many of us in all walks of life — not only ministers and health care
professionals and hospice volunteers — will be able to play the role of
companion on the deathwalk, helping the dying to approach the next life with
grace and courage and to make the last seasons of this life a period of
personal growth. The skills required in this area include the ability to
communicate on a soul level with patients who are unable to speak or reason
clearly. A vital aspect of this work is facilitating or mediating contact
between the dying and helpers on the other side — especially departed loved
ones — who can give assistance through the transition. Dream sharing and dream
transfer are invaluable tools in helping the dying to prepare for the
conditions of life beyond the body.

4.Helping the departed. We pray for our dead in our churches and
temples, and no good intention is ever wasted. However, you may have a hard
time finding a priest who is willing to take on the role of psychopomp,
or guide of souls, and provide personal escort service to spirits of the
departed who have lost their way and gotten stuck between the worlds, causing
pain and confusion to themselves and sometimes to their survivors. Yet the
living have a crucial role to play in helping to release earthbound or troubled
spirits. For one thing, some of these “ex-physicals” seem to trust people who
have physical bodies more than entities that do not, because there is comfort
in the familiar, because they did not believe in an afterlife before passing on
— or quite simply because they do not know they are dead. Sometimes our
deceased need help from us in dealing with unfinished business, passing on
messages to survivors, and getting their story straight. I have become
convinced that an essential stage in the afterlife transit is the effort by the
departed to understand the full story of the life that has just passed, in
order to be ready to choose the next life experience.

5.Making death your ally. Finally, we are challenged to reach into the
place of our deepest fears and master them: to face our own death on its own
ground and re-value our lives and our purpose from this perspective. When we
“brave up” enough to confront our personal Death and receive its teaching, we
forge an alliance that is a source of power and healing in every aspect of
life.

I read the last
lines of The Dervish House and said, “Wonderful!” out loud. I want to read the
book again to savor all that is in it and to understand more fully some of the
intricate description of nanotechnology, hedge fund operations, the history of
Sufi lodges, the legend of the Mellified Man, the geography of Istanbul. Ian
McDonald is astonishingly deep and diverse in his knowledge. He writes about everything with exact and fine detail
and vocabulary and – amazingly! – this is never wearisome, though it makes the
book a slow (but always fascinating) read. I never doubted that his six main
characters, sharing apartments in a converted dervish house on the Asian side
of Istanbul, are Turks (if we include the elderly Greek “experimental economist”,
Georghios Ferentinou, as we must). There are no concessions to the non-Turkish
reader. Every Turkish word is given with the Turkish spelling and necessary
diacritical marks. The sole concession is with jinn, rendered djinn, no doubt
at the publisher’s insistence. Even Shams of Tabriz becomes Çams with the cedilla under the C. Just when you
think the author can’t possibly trump himself, we read this on the penultimate page, where the focus is on Necmet,
who has been turned into a shayk who sees djinn and talks to Hizir (the guide of those who have no earthly guide, called Khidr in Arabic) by a
nano-pharmaceutical exploded in a terrorist suicide on a tram:

The army doctor...told him a story about the Mevlana, the
great saint whose order built this tekke. The Mevlana has a friend, Shams of
Tabriz, a spiritual friend, the other half of his soul, one spirit in two
bodies. Together they explored the depths of God in ceaseless conversation. The
dervishes grew jealous of the one-in-twoness and quietly killed Shams of
Tabriz. When the Mevlana was unable to find his
friend, the only possible conclusion was that they had merged and Shams was now
part of him.

Why should I seek?I am the same as he.His essence speaks through me.I have been looking for myself.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

One of the fun assignments in my tarot workshops is for everyone to produce a sketch of a personal tarot card, based on discoveries and imagery that came to them during the program. There is no shortage of material, since our Tarot for Dreamers playshops include theater and performance, journeys through the doorways of the cards, monologues in the voices of both major and minor arcana as well as readings for ourselves and each other in many different styles. In my tarot workshop last weekend, I produced sketches of several cards, including a Priestess inspired by the snake journey I described in my last article here. The card that demanded my closest attention was the Four of Swords. In a Celtic Cross spread, it had come up in the position of my Hopes and Fears. I had seen it in the same place before, in another recent reading, and realized that I needed to explore why this number card - a benign one in the sometimes scary and clanking procession of the Swords - might speak to me of my Hopes and Fears. My personal name for the Four of Swords is Rest. My catch phrase for it is "Time Off". Weapons are laid down or hung up on the walls. We have moved beyond the pain and grief and possible self-laceration of the Three of Swords; we are not yet menaced by the terrible mental strife of the Five of Swords. A period of calm and relaxation might certainly figure among my hopes; why would is also be a source of fear? In one of our exercises, I drummed for the group, inviting our participants to step through the frame of a selected card, as through a door, to learn more about the character of the card within its own realm. When I let my mind travel through the frame of the Four of Swords, I saw metal pens hanging on a wall. They were the Zebra F-402 pens, inexpensive but elegant, that I generally use. I strolled from a writing nook through an open doorway into a rather Hawaiian scene with a sandy beach, palm trees, a lounger near the water. A great place for rest and relaxation, imagined or physical. Then why the fear? I looked back into the writing space and saw one of my pens lying on top of an unfinished manuscript. Ah, yes. Now I saw it. The writer in me - who might be the creator and producer in other contexts also - fears rest periods because he knows that starting up a project that has been left for a while requires overcoming the heavy weight of inertia. So I produced a personal version of the Four of Swords with the hope of delightful R&R, but also the implied fear of that pen laid to rest across the unfinished book.My next "Tarot for Dreamers" workshop is at magical Mosswood Hollow, 45 minutes from Seattle, over the weekend of May 9-10, 2015.

Friday, March 20, 2015

In the mid-15th century, the monks of San Francesco, in Borgo San Sepolcro in Tuscany, allotted 510 ducats - a fantastic sum at that time - for a double-sided altarpiece. The lead artist was Stefano de Giovanni, known as "Sassetta", already recognized as the master of the Siena school. The altarpiece was constructed over the grave of of the Blessed Ranieri Rasini, and a series of panels on the predella depicted scenes from his life.

The Blessed Ranieri (just short of sainthood) was revered locally as a miracle maker with the ability to project an energy double that could work wonders while his body was engaged somewhere else. Thus he ranks as an all-but-patron-saint of dream travel and astral projection.

Anyone interested in the history of dream travel would do well to look very closely at two surviving paintings of the Blessed Ranieri, by the great Sassetta. The one above is titled "The Blessed Ranieri Freeing the Poor from Jail", and it is in the Louvre. It shows Ranieri whizzing around like a rocket man.

The second painting shows Ranieri appearing to a cardinal in a dream; this panel is now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. It depicts Ranieri floating in mid-air above the sleeping body of a well-fed cardinal, pointing to a flask containing a healing balm.

It was a good thing for those who saw the Blessed Ranieri (d. 1304) flying about in this way that they were living in a Catholic country where bilocation and astral projection were welcomed, at least when practiced by the religiously correct. In the Puritan theocracy of colonial Massachusetts, a couple of centuries later, a snitch who claimed to have seen you flying around in your dream body could get you hauled into a Salem witch trial.

I'll be interested in further information on the flying holy man in Sassetta's paintings. His aerial visit to the rotund cardinal is mentioned in Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, edited by Machtelt Israels, but it seems that the identity of the cardinal is a matter for speculation. A pleasant legend survives in a later account (1622) by a printer named Giovanni Antonio Castiglione, according to which the monks had emissaries sent to a certain cardinal to request balm to preserve the Blessed Ranieri's body after he died "in the odor of sanctity." The flying Ranieri got to the cardinal first, offering a deal: balm for his body in return for healing for the cardinal. So, in the painting, he has gone in ahead of the emissaries waiting outside the cardinal's bedchamber. Ranieri was the subject of a religious play that was popular in Tuscany.Art:

"The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Prison in Florence" (c.1440) by Sassetta, in the Musée du Louvre, Paris

"The Blessed Ranieri of Borgo San Sepolcro Appearing to a Cardinal in a Dream" (1444) in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Kalani, HawaiiIn a dream last night, I parted company with a group of soldiers, carrying a rifle. In my hands, it turned into wooden gun that started dividing like a branch of a tree. I clambered with it through a passage. On the other side a woman, seeing what I was carrying, shouted in high excitement, "It's a quince!" I looked and saw, on leaves that had sprouted, little golden fruit and seeds. They seemed to be pulsing and vibrating, ready to burst into new life. The woman took one on her tongue and swallowed it with pleasure. "We must plant them at once!" she exclaimed, leading me up to a place on a hill. I woke happy and excited. I must now look into the history, mythology and uses of the quince. I know some think that the apple of Eve, in the Garden of Eden, was really a quince. I recall it is generally thought that the golden apple that Paris threw to Aphrodite - starting the Trojan War - was a quince. I have heard of turning swords into plowshares. Turning guns into quinces is an interesting fresh version.Graphic:Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen. Public Domain.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Hilo, HawaiiAs I waited for my first flight en route to Hawaii on Sunday morning, I was thinking about who I need to include in the Acknowledgments for my new book. It his me that I must express special thanks to the dogs who have shared my life, including the little dogs who take me on daily walks when I am at home in a small city in the Northeast, constantly bringing me to "sidewalk oracles". I sometimes journal my daily observations of synchronicity as my Dog Walk Chronicles. On the long second flight from Chicago to Honolulu, my rowmate told me she had left from the same home airport and - like me - travels far afield almost every week for her work. "What are the chances?" I reflected that when synchronicity magnets are operating, the chances are pretty good. "Tell me a story from your life," I invited her. I do this with strangers all the time. She thought for a moment, then beamed. "I got my husband a yellow lab puppy for his birthday." She told me how their beloved yellow lab had died three years ago and it had taken that amount of time to feel ready to replace her. She decided on a puppy because her daughter begged for a dog they could watch grow."It's extra work, but we are all so happy. My husband plays with the puppy like a little boy." I observed that dogs love you know matter what, and thanked the stranger on the plane for communicating a tail wag from the universe. Yes, I must start by thanking the dogs when I write those acknowledgments.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

I pull a Tarot card for the day, drawing from a deck called Navigators of the Mystic Sea. I have drawn the Queen of Swords, In this deck, she is tagged with the word "Subversion". Instead of thinking about what she may represent for me today, I decide that I'll enter her perspective and try to grasp what part of me may be like the Queen of Swords, and what strengths and challenges come with that.I am seated in a high black throne on the edge of a chasm. My robes are gold and purple, and I wear a gold helmet with a long back-plate that protects my neck. A huge solitary raven perches on the top of my throne, above my head. Though I am seated, my right arm, brandishing a sword, is vigorously outstretched, pointing to the far side of the abyss, as if am ordering an army to attempt the dangerous crossing – or warning off an unseen force on the other side. In my left palm, I am holding what may be an orb but could also be a pocket watch. Where my robes flow over the armrest of the throne, they burst into other colors – blue and lavender, teal and pink and gold again. The same colors stream like ribbons through the sky above the high orange peaks in the background, and – joining my streaming robes – along the edge of the abyss. In the distance, a strange brown dog (if it is a dog) is leaping over the chasm, from the far side towards my side. When I inspect his jump, I see that the far side of the abyss is higher than my side.I remember that, in other images, I am represented as holding a severed head, and that I have been called the Mask Cutter. My sharp sword gives me the power to strip away illusion and pretension. But I know that the sharpness of my intellect can suppress my essential feminine gifts and that, misused, my sword can cut down the brightest hopes and ambitions. I cut deep. A solitary raven is not to be trusted. The raven you can rely on is one of a pair. The head is not to be trusted without the heart. I have come to the very edge. I may order others to take the jump, but do not take it myself. Yet I am barefoot, which gives me the ability to touch and feel the earth if I am willing to listen to my body. I am beautiful but cold and aloof and unforgiving. I place myself above others. The dog, jumping to my side, could help to soften me. There is a story to be written about me, and why I sit, with sword unsheathed at this high and wild and lonely border. My throne is also my prison, from which I can be released only with the help of the dog and the second raven, the one who does not appear on the card. There is a clue in the arrangement of the scene. I sit on the left side of the chasm, and on the left side of the brain.Note: I first posted this piece a few years ago. I am posting again because of a friend's question about the significance of the Queen of Swords. Entering the perspective of this court card is as an example of how we can learn to meditate or journey with tarot. I am leading a "Tarot for Dreamers" weekend workshop involving this and other practices for active dreamers who are interested in tarot at magical Mosswood Hollow on May 9-10.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

He is the archetype of the wounded healer. He is both human
and divine, the son of Apollo by a mortal woman. He is deeply connected to the
realm of the animal spirits. His familiars are the snake, the dog and the cock.
The name of his mother, Coronis, suggests a link to the family of crows and
ravens. He is mentored by Chiron, the
centaur.
His symbol is a long staff, shoulder
high, with a snake wrapped around it. We see this everywhere today, on the
sides of ambulances, on the doors of hospitals, as medical letterhead. Our
doctors still take the oath that ancient physicians dedicated to him, and his
divine family, though the god-names have been removed. Western medicine begins
in his precinct, though it no longer honors his name and often omits the
essentials of his way.
His name is Asklepios, Latinized as Aesculapius
by the Romans when they floated his statue up the Tiber to make him at home in
Italy. I had the pleasure of talking about him today on my “Way of the Dreamer”
radio show with Dr. Edward Tick, a gifted and compassionate therapist who has
labored for many years to revive the way of Asklepian dream healing. As Ed Tick
noted, the name Asklepios evokes “a tradition
of holistic healing that was prized in the ancient world for two thousand years,
a tradition in which dreams are regarded as epiphanies through which
communication is opened between humans and divine powers.”.
Pilgrims journeyed to more than three
hundred temples of Asklepios around the Mediterranean and (according to recent
archaeology) as far west as Britain. The helpers of Asklepios – the original
therapeuts, or therapists – and his followers looked to dreams for diagnosis, prescription
and an invitation for direct contact with the sacred guide and healer. The
pilgrims traveled in hopes of a big dream
that would be a “showing forth” of the god or one of his family and might, in
itself, deliver healing from complaints that human remedies could not cure.
Ed Tick evokes Asklepios and his way
with passion and eloquence, scholarship and deep familiarity with the ancient
sites. He is the author of an excellent book on the Asklepian tradition, The Practice of Dream Healing and of two
important and profoundly moving books inspired by his work to heal wounded
warriors and bring them home, War and the
Soul and Warrior's Return.
In our conversation, Ed recalled how
the Asklepian tradition was suppressed by the Christian authorities and
disappeared or went underground after the fifth century, to revive, under
extraordinary circumstances, in the aftermath of World War II. A world
catastrophe of that order, Tick suggested, calls forth tremendous archetypal
powers. The return of the god was heralded by a curious incident involving a
company of British troops bivouacked at Epidauros, the site of the most famous
Asklepian temple in the Hellenic world, at the end of the war. As Ed tells it,
soldiers came one by one to their commanding officer to request that the unit
should be moved to another camp site. Why? They told their captain the place
was haunted. They had all seen the same “ghost” – a bearded man carrying a long
staff with a snake wrapped around it.
Asklepios entered modern psychology
in the same period through the dream of a patient of Jung’s student and
colleague C.A. Meier. She gave Meier a one-line dream report. She heard the
words, “The best thing he ever created was Epidauros.” Meier did not recognize
the Greek place name, but he embarked on a search that eventually led him to
write an important work on the ancient practice of dream incubation and dream
healing. As Tick tells it, there was an Asklepian touch in the play of
synchronicity between Jung and Meier. When Jung was reflecting on who
would do most to continue his work as
they walked and talked together by the lake, a snake rose from the water and
slithered between Meier’s legs, which the ancients would certainly have taken
as a numen, a nod of approval from greater powers.
A key principle in Asklepian practice,
as Ed presents it, is that “you do not ask the gods for help until you have run
out of human options.” Another, quite foreign to modern medicine, at least in
the United States, is that “you do not put the patient under financial
pressure.” This mode of healing is open to everyone who is ready to make the
journey to the temple and to dream with the god. “Fees are paid only after
healing, and in proportion to a person’s resources. A slave may give an apple,
an emperor may pay for a new temple or theater.”
The practice of Asklepian healing
begins as a quest. You go on a pilgrimage, when you have failed to find other
remedies for what ails you. You travel to a holistic center. You pray. You are
shown images of the gods, and evidence of what happened before”. You see hundreds,
maybe thousands of votive offerings and inscriptions depicting healings that
have taken place. This stirs up the psyche, fires the imagination, primes you
for a big experience in the sacred night. The temple helpers will ask you about
your dreams, looking for a dream of invitation, noting when the caliber of your
dreams indicates that you are not ready for the big experience.
Quoting the ancient documents, Ed
recounts the case of a rich man who was denied entry to the abaton – the place of encounter with the
god in the sacred night – because his dreams suggested that his character was
so defective that he was unready and unworthy. He was told he must dedicate
himself to the care of the sick and the poor, even of lepers, for a year before
he could return to try again.
Pilgrims hoped for night visitations
from figures resembling the statues and paintings they had been shown – from Asklepios,
or one of his three daughters, or one of his animal familiars. “Collective
images will help produce archetypal dreams,” Ed observes. A visitation of this
kind could deliver full healing in a single night. The ancient testimonies include
the account of a soldier who came to the temple with an arrow embedded in his
body that could not be extracted by surgery. In his night vision, Asklepios
himself deftly removed the arrow. In the morning, the soldier was fully healed,
the arrow extracted.
Such experiences must be honored.
Dreams require action. As Ed Tick puts it, “once you have the dream you have to
bring it into the world.” This sometimes meant taking actions that would seem
crazy to most people and certainly most doctors. We discussed the case of
Aelius Aristides, a famous orator who turned to Asklepios many times for
guidance and healing. When he was in the grip of a raging fever, he was ordered
by the god in a dream to obtain a horse and ride to an icy river and plunge in –
which he proceeded to do.
Contact with animals and animal
spirits is a vital part of this tradition. The snake is a primary healing ally
of Asklepios. There were snake pits in the Asklepian sanctuaries, and seekers
of big dreams often had to brave up to serpents (non-venomous, but still scary
for many) slithering over them in the night. In the testimonies, healing was
often delivered by the experience of a snake licking or biting or coiling round
an afflicted part of the body. Ed talked about how he experimented with a
modern reenactment of this by inviting a woman snake dancer to bring some of
her serpents to one of his retreats. He was fascinated by how the snakes
behaved differently with different persons, sometimes as if they understood
where someone was experiencing a problem. The same snake would coil on the head
of one person, and wrap around the belly of someone with intestinal complaints.
The dog, the second Asklepian animal
ally, is the guide of souls and guardian of passage to the Underworld in many
traditions, the friendliest of animals to man, and a primary “bridge to nature”
in many lives, ancient and contemporary. As we discussed the dog of Asklepios,
my mind flew to an experience I had when I attended a workshop with Ed in the
Bahamas when we were co-presenters at a conference there last January.
Ed had described how the philosopher
Proclus received relief for his gout after he invoked Asklepios. When he was sitting with his leg up, swathed in
bandages, a sparrow landed on his foot and proceeded to
strip away the bandages. His gout was gone. I was keenly interested, since I
suffer from occasional flare-ups of gout, and my left foot was feeling very
sore that day.
Ed gave us a short meditation – to go to a
place in the body where we felt aches or pains, and ask any of the divine
figures mentioned in the Asklepios story (including his animal triad of snake,
dog and cock) for healing. I went to my aching left foot. I tried to visualize
Proclus’ sparrow. Instead, a beloved black dog who shared my life and often
appears in my dreams, leaped on me, licking my toes, rubbing joyfully against
my body, licking my face. This was all but physical. I saw again the great
craters made by that big dog’s paws as we walked on a Sag Harbor beach in
winter. My heart swelled to bursting with love. Dogs love you no matter what,
and they may be healing gods in disguise.
The rooster, or cock, is the third
Asklepian animal familiar, the animal of sacrifice – and also the liminal creature
that heralds the transition from night to day, from sleep to waking. The famous
last words of Socrates after he drained the hemlock were, “Crito, we owe a cock
to Asklepios”, reminding us that the most famous voice of Greek philosophy was
also deeply immersed in the Asklepian way.
We need this practice today, in our
lives and our world. Ed and I discussed how to apply the key elements of
Asklepian practice, both at special places and healing centers, in small groups
and in our individual lives. Ed gently insisted that gentleness is a primary requirement. Though the derivation of the name "Asklepios" is disputed, Robert Graves suggested that it means "unceasingly gentle." I proposed that a vital principle from the Asklepian way to be applied in our lives today is that help from greater powers is always available, and that we want to
remember to ask nicely. I quoted
Aelius Aristides, the ancient orator who asked for healing by speaking to his
god along the following lines: “I ask for the measure for the measure of health
my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul.”
Ed reciprocated by reciting for us
lines from the Homeric Hymn to Asklepios:

Great to humanity, soother of cruel suffering…
You are welcomed, Master. By this song I beseech you.-

My conversation with Ed Tick on my radio show can be downloaded from the Way of the Dreamer archive. Ed's website is Soldier's Heart.

I highly recommend the following books by Edward Tick Ph.D.: The Practice of Dream Healing, War and the Soul and Warrior's Return: Restoring the Soul After War

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